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Artificial intelligence (AI) is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. Textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents,"[1] where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chances of success.[2]John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1956,[3] defines it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines."[4]

The field was founded on the claim that a central property of humans, intelligence—the sapience of Homo sapiens—can be so precisely described that it can be simulated by a machine.[5] This raises philosophical issues about the nature of the mind and limits of scientific hubris, issues which have been addressed by myth, fiction and philosophy since antiquity.[6] Artificial intelligence has been the subject of optimism,[7] but has also suffered setbacks[8] and, today, has become an essential part of the technology industry, providing the heavy lifting for many of the most difficult problems in computer science.[9]

AI research is highly technical and specialized, deeply divided into subfields that often fail to communicate with each other.[10] Subfields have grown up around particular institutions, the work of individual researchers, the solution of specific problems, longstanding differences of opinion about how AI should be done and the application of widely differing tools. The central problems of AI include such traits as reasoning, knowledge, planning, learning, communication, perception and the ability to move and manipulate objects.[11] General intelligence (or "strong AI") is still a long-term goal of (some) research.[12]

The field of AI research was founded at a conference on the campus of Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956.[25] The attendees, including John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, became the leaders of AI research for many decades.[26] They and their students wrote programs that were, to most people, simply astonishing:[27] computers were solving word problems in algebra, proving logical theorems and speaking English.[28] By the middle of the 1960s, research in the U.S. was heavily funded by the Department of Defense[29] and laboratories had been established around the world.[30] AI's founders were profoundly optimistic about the future of the new field: Herbert Simon predicted that "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do"[31] and Marvin Minsky agreed, writing that "within a generation ... the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved".[32]

They had failed to recognize the difficulty of some of the problems they faced.[33] In 1974, in response to the criticism of England's Sir James Lighthill and ongoing pressure from Congress to fund more productive projects, the U.S. and British governments cut off all undirected, exploratory research in AI. The next few years, when funding for projects was hard to find, would later be called an "AI winter".[34]

In the early 1980s, AI research was revived by the commercial success of expert systems,[35] a form of AI program that simulated the knowledge and analytical skills of one or more human experts. By 1985 the market for AI had reached over a billion dollars. At the same time, Japan's fifth generation computer project inspired the U.S and British governments to restore funding for academic research in the field.[36] However, beginning with the collapse of the Lisp Machine market in 1987, AI once again fell into disrepute, and a second, longer lasting AI winter began.[37]

In the 1990s and early 21st century, AI achieved its greatest successes, albeit somewhat behind the scenes. Artificial intelligence is used for logistics, data mining, medical diagnosis and many other areas throughout the technology industry.[9] The success was due to several factors: the incredible power of computers today (see Moore's law), a greater emphasis on solving specific subproblems, the creation of new ties between AI and other fields working on similar problems, and above all a new commitment by researchers to solid mathematical methods and rigorous scientific standards.[38]

Problems

The general problem of simulating (or creating) intelligence has been broken down into a number of specific sub-problems. These consist of particular traits or capabilities that researchers would like an intelligent system to display. The traits described below have received the most attention.[11]

Deduction, reasoning, problem solving

Early AI researchers developed algorithms that imitated the step-by-step reasoning that humans were often assumed to use when they solve puzzles, play board games or make logical deductions.[39] By the late 1980s and '90s, AI research had also developed highly successful methods for dealing with uncertain or incomplete information, employing concepts from probability and economics.[40]

For difficult problems, most of these algorithms can require enormous computational resources — most experience a "combinatorial explosion": the amount of memory or computer time required becomes astronomical when the problem goes beyond a certain size. The search for more efficient problem solving algorithms is a high priority for AI research.[41]

Human beings solve most of their problems using fast, intuitive judgments rather than the conscious, step-by-step deduction that early AI research was able to model.[42] AI has made some progress at imitating this kind of "sub-symbolic" problem solving: embodied agent approaches emphasize the importance of sensorimotor skills to higher reasoning; neural net research attempts to simulate the structures inside human and animal brains that give rise to this skill.

Knowledge representation

Knowledge representation[43] and knowledge engineering[44] are central to AI research. Many of the problems machines are expected to solve will require extensive knowledge about the world. Among the things that AI needs to represent are: objects, properties, categories and relations between objects;[45] situations, events, states and time;[46] causes and effects;[47] knowledge about knowledge (what we know about what other people know);[48] and many other, less well researched domains. A complete representation of "what exists" is an ontology[49] (borrowing a word from traditional philosophy), of which the most general are called upper ontologies.

Many of the things people know take the form of "working assumptions." For example, if a bird comes up in conversation, people typically picture an animal that is fist sized, sings, and flies. None of these things are true about all birds. John McCarthy identified this problem in 1969[50] as the qualification problem: for any commonsense rule that AI researchers care to represent, there tend to be a huge number of exceptions. Almost nothing is simply true or false in the way that abstract logic requires. AI research has explored a number of solutions to this problem.[51]

The number of atomic facts that the average person knows is astronomical. Research projects that attempt to build a complete knowledge base of commonsense knowledge (e.g., Cyc) require enormous amounts of laborious ontological engineering — they must be built, by hand, one complicated concept at a time.[52] A major goal is to have the computer understand enough concepts to be able to learn by reading from sources like the internet, and thus be able to add to its own ontology.

Much of what people know is not represented as "facts" or "statements" that they could actually say out loud. For example, a chess master will avoid a particular chess position because it "feels too exposed"[53] or an art critic can take one look at a statue and instantly realize that it is a fake.[54] These are intuitions or tendencies that are represented in the brain non-consciously and sub-symbolically.[55] Knowledge like this informs, supports and provides a context for symbolic, conscious knowledge. As with the related problem of sub-symbolic reasoning, it is hoped that situated AI or computational intelligence will provide ways to represent this kind of knowledge.[55]

Planning

Intelligent agents must be able to set goals and achieve them.[56] They need a way to visualize the future (they must have a representation of the state of the world and be able to make predictions about how their actions will change it) and be able to make choices that maximize the utility (or "value") of the available choices.[57]

In classical planning problems, the agent can assume that it is the only thing acting on the world and it can be certain what the consequences of its actions may be.[58] However, if this is not true, it must periodically check if the world matches its predictions and it must change its plan as this becomes necessary, requiring the agent to reason under uncertainty.[59]

Natural language processing

Natural language processing[64] gives machines the ability to read and understand the languages that humans speak. Many researchers hope that a sufficiently powerful natural language processing system would be able to acquire knowledge on its own, by reading the existing text available over the internet. Some straightforward applications of natural language processing include information retrieval (or text mining) and machine translation.[65]

Motion and manipulation

The Care-Providing robot FRIEND uses sensors like cameras and intelligent algorithms to control the manipulator in order to support disabled and elderly people in their daily life activities.

Social intelligence

Emotion and social skills[73] play two roles for an intelligent agent. First, it must be able to predict the actions of others, by understanding their motives and emotional states. (This involves elements of game theory, decision theory, as well as the ability to model human emotions and the perceptual skills to detect emotions.) Also, for good human-computer interaction, an intelligent machine also needs to display emotions. At the very least it must appear polite and sensitive to the humans it interacts with. At best, it should have normal emotions itself.

Creativity

A sub-field of AI addresses creativity both theoretically (from a philosophical and psychological perspective) and practically (via specific implementations of systems that generate outputs that can be considered creative). A related area of computational research is Artificial Intuition and Artificial Imagination.

Many of the problems above are considered AI-complete: to solve one problem, you must solve them all. For example, even a straightforward, specific task like machine translation requires that the machine follow the author's argument (reason), know what is being talked about (knowledge), and faithfully reproduce the author's intention (social intelligence). Machine translation, therefore, is believed to be AI-complete: it may require strong AI to be done as well as humans can do it.[75]

Approaches

There is no established unifying theory or paradigm that guides AI research. Researchers disagree about many issues.[76] A few of the most long standing questions that have remained unanswered are these: should artificial intelligence simulate natural intelligence, by studying psychology or neurology? Or is human biology as irrelevant to AI research as bird biology is to aeronautical engineering?[77] Can intelligent behavior be described using simple, elegant principles (such as logic or optimization)? Or does it necessarily require solving a large number of completely unrelated problems?[78] Can intelligence be reproduced using high-level symbols, similar to words and ideas? Or does it require "sub-symbolic" processing?[79]

Symbolic

When access to digital computers became possible in the middle 1950s, AI research began to explore the possibility that human intelligence could be reduced to symbol manipulation. The research was centered in three institutions: CMU, Stanford and MIT, and each one developed its own style of research. John Haugeland named these approaches to AI "good old fashioned AI" or "GOFAI".[80]

When computers with large memories became available around 1970, researchers from all three traditions began to build knowledge into AI applications.[87] This "knowledge revolution" led to the development and deployment of expert systems (introduced by Edward Feigenbaum), the first truly successful form of AI software.[35] The knowledge revolution was also driven by the realization that enormous amounts of knowledge would be required by many simple AI applications.

Sub-symbolic

During the 1960s, symbolic approaches had achieved great success at simulating high-level thinking in small demonstration programs. Approaches based on cybernetics or neural networks were abandoned or pushed into the background.[88] By the 1980s, however, progress in symbolic AI seemed to stall and many believed that symbolic systems would never be able to imitate all the processes of human cognition, especially perception, robotics, learning and pattern recognition. A number of researchers began to look into "sub-symbolic" approaches to specific AI problems.[79]

Researchers from the related field of robotics, such as Rodney Brooks, rejected symbolic AI and focused on the basic engineering problems that would allow robots to move and survive.[89] Their work revived the non-symbolic viewpoint of the early cybernetics researchers of the 50s and reintroduced the use of control theory in AI. This coincided with the development of the embodied mind thesis in the related field of cognitive science: the idea that aspects of the body (such as movement, perception and visualization) are required for higher intelligence.

Statistical

In the 1990s, AI researchers developed sophisticated mathematical tools to solve specific subproblems. These tools are truly scientific, in the sense that their results are both measurable and verifiable, and they have been responsible for many of AI's recent successes. The shared mathematical language has also permitted a high level of collaboration with more established fields (like mathematics, economics or operations research). Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig describe this movement as nothing less than a "revolution" and "the victory of the neats."[38]

Integrating the approaches

Intelligent agent paradigm

An intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximizes its chances of success. The simplest intelligent agents are programs that solve specific problems. The most complicated intelligent agents are rational, thinking humans.[92] The paradigm gives researchers license to study isolated problems and find solutions that are both verifiable and useful, without agreeing on one single approach. An agent that solves a specific problem can use any approach that works — some agents are symbolic and logical, some are sub-symbolic neural networks and others may use new approaches. The paradigm also gives researchers a common language to communicate with other fields—such as decision theory and economics—that also use concepts of abstract agents. The intelligent agent paradigm became widely accepted during the 1990s.[93]

Tools

In the course of 50 years of research, AI has developed a large number of tools to solve the most difficult problems in computer science. A few of the most general of these methods are discussed below.

Simple exhaustive searches[99] are rarely sufficient for most real world problems: the search space (the number of places to search) quickly grows to astronomical numbers. The result is a search that is too slow or never completes. The solution, for many problems, is to use "heuristics" or "rules of thumb" that eliminate choices that are unlikely to lead to the goal (called "pruning the search tree"). Heuristics supply the program with a "best guess" for what path the solution lies on.[100]

A very different kind of search came to prominence in the 1990s, based on the mathematical theory of optimization. For many problems, it is possible to begin the search with some form of a guess and then refine the guess incrementally until no more refinements can be made. These algorithms can be visualized as blind hill climbing: we begin the search at a random point on the landscape, and then, by jumps or steps, we keep moving our guess uphill, until we reach the top. Other optimization algorithms are simulated annealing, beam search and random optimization.[101]

Probabilistic methods for uncertain reasoning

Many problems in AI (in reasoning, planning, learning, perception and robotics) require the agent to operate with incomplete or uncertain information. Starting in the late 80s and early 90s, Judea Pearl and others championed the use of methods drawn from probability theory and economics to devise a number of powerful tools to solve these problems.[113][114]

Classifiers and statistical learning methods

The simplest AI applications can be divided into two types: classifiers ("if shiny then diamond") and controllers ("if shiny then pick up"). Controllers do however also classify conditions before inferring actions, and therefore classification forms a central part of many AI systems. Classifiers are functions that use pattern matching to determine a closest match. They can be tuned according to examples, making them very attractive for use in AI. These examples are known as observations or patterns. In supervised learning, each pattern belongs to a certain predefined class. A class can be seen as a decision that has to be made. All the observations combined with their class labels are known as a data set. When a new observation is received, that observation is classified based on previous experience.[126]

Evaluating progress

How can one determine if an agent is intelligent? In 1950, Alan Turing proposed a general procedure to test the intelligence of an agent now known as the Turing test. This procedure allows almost all the major problems of artificial intelligence to be tested. However, it is a very difficult challenge and at present all agents fail.

Artificial intelligence can also be evaluated on specific problems such as small problems in chemistry, hand-writing recognition and game-playing. Such tests have been termed subject matter expert Turing tests. Smaller problems provide more achievable goals and there are an ever-increasing number of positive results.

The broad classes of outcome for an AI test are:

Optimal: it is not possible to perform better

Strong super-human: performs better than all humans

Super-human: performs better than most humans

Sub-human: performs worse than most humans

For example, performance at draughts is optimal,[142] performance at chess is super-human and nearing strong super-human,[143] and performance at many everyday tasks performed by humans is sub-human.

A quite different approach measures machine intelligence through tests which are developed from mathematical definitions of intelligence. Examples of these kinds of tests start in the late nineties devising intelligence tests using notions from Kolmogorov Complexity and data compression.[144][145] Similar definitions of machine intelligence have been put forward by Marcus Hutter in his book Universal Artificial Intelligence (Springer 2005), an idea further developed by Legg and Hutter.[146] Two major advantages of mathematical definitions are their applicability to nonhuman intelligences and their absence of a requirement for human testers.

Competitions and prizes

There are a number of competitions and prizes to promote research in artificial intelligence. The main areas promoted are: general machine intelligence, conversational behavior, data-mining, driverless cars, robot soccer and games.

Platforms

A platform (or "computing platform")is defined as "some sort of hardware architecture or software framework (including application frameworks), that allows software to run." As Rodney Brooks [148] pointed out many years ago, it is not just the artificial intelligence software that defines the AI features of the platform, but rather the actual platform itself that affects the AI that results, i.e., we need to be working out AI problems on real world platforms rather than in isolation.

A wide variety of platforms has allowed different aspects of AI to develop, ranging from expert systems, albeit PC-based but still an entire real-world system to various robot platforms such as the widely available Roomba with open interface.[149]

Philosophy

Artificial intelligence, by claiming to be able to recreate the capabilities of the human mind, is both a challenge and an inspiration for philosophy. Are there limits to how intelligent machines can be? Is there an essential difference between human intelligence and artificial intelligence? Can a machine have a mind and consciousness? A few of the most influential answers to these questions are given below.[150]

If a machine acts as intelligently as a human being, then it is as intelligent as a human being.Alan Turing theorized that, ultimately, we can only judge the intelligence of a machine based on its behavior. This theory forms the basis of the Turing test.[151]

"Every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it." This assertion was printed in the proposal for the Dartmouth Conference of 1956, and represents the position of most working AI researchers.[152]

"A physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means of general intelligent action." Newell and Simon argue that intelligences consists of formal operations on symbols.[153]Hubert Dreyfus argued that, on the contrary, human expertise depends on unconscious instinct rather than conscious symbol manipulation and on having a "feel" for the situation rather than explicit symbolic knowledge. (See Dreyfus' critique of AI.)[154][155]

"The appropriately programmed computer with the right inputs and outputs would thereby have a mind in exactly the same sense human beings have minds."[158] Searle counters this assertion with his Chinese room argument, which asks us to look inside the computer and try to find where the "mind" might be.[159]

The brain can be simulated.Hans Moravec, Ray Kurzweil and others have argued that it is technologically feasible to copy the brain directly into hardware and software, and that such a simulation will be essentially identical to the original.[160]

Prediction

AI is a common topic in both science fiction and projections about the future of technology and society. The existence of an artificial intelligence that rivals human intelligence raises difficult ethical issues, and the potential power of the technology inspires both hopes and fears.

The impact of AI on society is a serious area of study for futurists. Academic sources have considered such consequences as a decreased demand for human labor,[164] the enhancement of human ability or experience,[165] and a need for redefinition of human identity and basic values.[166] Andrew Kennedy, in his musing on the evolution of the human personality,[167] considered that artificial intelligences or 'new minds' are likely to have severe personality disorders, and identifies four particular types that are likely to arise: the autistic, the collector, the ecstatic, and the victim. He suggests that they will need humans because of our superior understanding of personality and the role of the unconscious.

Several futurists argue that artificial intelligence will transcend the limits of progress. Ray Kurzweil has used Moore's law (which describes the relentless exponential improvement in digital technology with uncanny accuracy) to calculate that desktop computers will have the same processing power as human brains by the year 2029, and that by 2045 artificial intelligence will reach a point where it is able to improve itself at a rate that far exceeds anything conceivable in the past, a scenario that science fiction writer Vernor Vinge named the "technological singularity".[165]

^ abc This is a central idea of Pamela McCorduck's Machines That Think. She writes: "I like to think of artificial intelligence as the scientific apotheosis of a venerable cultural tradition." (McCorduck 2004, p. 34) "Artificial intelligence in one form or another is an idea that has pervaded Western intellectual history, a dream in urgent need of being realized." (McCorduck 2004, p. xviii) "Our history is full of attempts—nutty, eerie, comical, earnest, legendary and real—to make artificial intelligences, to reproduce what is the essential us—bypassing the ordinary means. Back and forth between myth and reality, our imaginations supplying what our workshops couldn't, we have engaged for a long time in this odd form of self-reproduction." (McCorduck 2004, p. 3) She traces the desire back to its Hellenistic roots and calls it the urge to "forge the Gods." (McCorduck 2004, p. 340-400)

^ Pamela McCorduck (2004, pp. 424) writes of "the rough shattering of AI in subfields—vision, natural language, decision theory, genetic algorithms, robotics ... and these with own sub-subfield—that would hardly have anything to say to each other."

^ ab This list of intelligent traits is based on the topics covered by the major AI textbooks, including:

These were the first machines to be believed to have true intelligence and consciousness. Hermes Trismegistus expressed the common belief that with these statues, craftsman had reproduced "the true nature of the gods", their sensus and spiritus. McCorduck makes the connection between sacred automatons and Mosaic law (developed around the same time), which expressly forbids the worship of robots (McCorduck 2004, pp. 6–9)

^McCarthy & Hayes 1969. While McCarthy was primarily concerned with issues in the logical representation of actions, Russell & Norvig 2003 apply the term to the more general issue of default reasoning in the vast network of assumptions underlying all our commonsense knowledge.

McCorduck 2004, pp. 100–101, who writes that there are "two major branches of artificial intelligence: one aimed at producing intelligent behavior regardless of how it was accomplioshed, and the other aimed at modeling intelligent processes found in nature, particularly human ones."

Kolata 1982, a paper in Science, which describes McCathy's indifference to biological models. Kolata quotes McCarthy as writing: "This is AI, so we don't care if it's psychologically real"[1]. McCarthy recently reiterated his position at the AI@50 conference where he said "Artificial intelligence is not, by definition, simulation of human intelligence" (Maker 2006).

^ Dreyfus criticized the necessary condition of the physical symbol system hypothesis, which he called the "psychological assumption": "The mind can be viewed as a device operating on bits of information according to formal rules". (Dreyfus 1992, p. 156)

^ This version is from Searle (1999), and is also quoted in Dennett 1991, p. 435. Searle's original formulation was "The appropriately programmed computer really is a mind, in the sense that computers given the right programs can be literally said to understand and have other cognitive states." (Searle 1980, p. 1). Strong AI is defined similarly by Russell & Norvig (2003, p. 947): "The assertion that machines could possibly act intelligently (or, perhaps better, act as if they were intelligent) is called the 'weak AI' hypothesis by philosophers, and the assertion that machines that do so are actually thinking (as opposed to simulating thinking) is called the 'strong AI' hypothesis."

The most extreme form of this argument (the brain replacement scenario) was put forward by Clark Glymour in the mid-70s and was touched on by Zenon Pylyshyn and John Searle in 1980. Daniel Dennett sees human consciousness as multiple functional thought patterns; see "Consciousness Explained". Dennett 1991

Of these approaches, the former two are considered to be
"white-box" approaches because they require our analysis of
intelligence to be based on the rationale for the behaviour rather
than the behaviour itself. The latter two are considered
"black-box" approaches because they operationalize intelligence by
measuring performance over a task domain. We prefer the latter two
because they allow for quantitative comparisons between systems
rather than requiring a qualitative comparison of rationales. We
realize that the ultimate performance of a system will depend
heavily on the task domain that it is situated in, and this
motivates our preference for studying activity (behaviour) rather
than thought (rationale).

Although the third approach, (known as cognitive modelling), is
of great importance to cognitive scientists, we concern ourselves
with the fourth approach. Of the four, this approach allows to
consider the performance of a theoretical system that yields the
behaviour optimally suited to achieve its goals, given the
information available to it.

This approach motivates us to provide a model for our
intelligent systems known as the intelligent agent.

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Learning materials and learning projects can be used by multiple
departments. Cooperate with other departments that use the same
learning resource. Understanding AI as a field of Computer Science
involves a thorough understanding of the following topics:

The term Artificial Intelligence (AI) was first coined by John McCarthy who used it to mean "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines". It can also refer to intelligence as exhibited by an artificial (man-made, non-natural, or manufactured) entity. While AI is the generally accepted term others, including both Computational Intelligence and Synthetic Intelligence have been proposed as potentially being "more accurate."[1] The terms strong and weak AI can be used to narrow the definition for classifying such systems. AI is studied in overlapping fields of computer science, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and engineering, dealing with intelligent behavior, learning, and adaptation and usually developed using customized machines or computers.

Research in AI is concerned with producing machines to automate tasks requiring intelligent behavior. Examples include control, planning and scheduling, the ability to answer diagnostic and consumer questions, handwriting, natural language, speech, and facial recognition. As such, the study of AI has also become an engineering discipline, focused on providing solutions to real life problems, knowledge mining, software applications, strategy games like computer chess and other video games. One of the biggest difficulties with AI is that of comprehension. Many devices have been created that can do amazing things, but critics of AI claim that no actual comprehension by the AI machine has taken place.